Knowledge-at-work

Deconstructing KM

Steve Barth will be taking KM to task next month in an interesting KnowledgeBoard presentation.

Steve levels these charges:

• Right information, to right people at the right time - is the wrong focus
• The quest to 'know what we know' or codification has failed to yield efficiency
• Structure and processes imposed by KM have limited (natural) inquiry, creativity and awareness
• KM tools have reduced cognitive effectivity

His critique is spot on. Process is a knowledge killer, information is about messages, knowledge is sense-making, awareness and learning, organization of information is NOT KM and capturing stuff in 'knowledgebases' has a proven poor ROI. Where do we go next?

• Deep dialog to foster emergence and knowledge creation?
• Patterns to capture experience and context?
• Distinctions to sharpen awareness and improve understanding?
• Relationships and trust to allow knowledge to flow?
• Creative abrasion to break established mental models?

What say you??

Talking up KM

Recently there have been blog posts looking at how we can best explain and present knowledge management. This is a difficult subject as the domain is fuzzy, there is no agreement on the nature of knowledge itself, and we continue to ponder the need to manage.

Mark Shawn and Andrew have made their thoughts on how to talk about KM explicit. I liked their take but found some key concepts missing or glossed over.

Knowledge is more than implicit and tacit stuff below the waterline. For me, knowledge is also sense-making, practical solutions, awareness, emergent and ephemeral. The key is not the difference between information / data and knowledge but what you do with this distinction.

Knowledge is social, needs relationships, trust and dialog to surface and must be tested. KM then must be about making people aware, must focus on new knowledge creation, needs linguistic processes e.g. distinctions that assign meaning to concepts, patterns that provide proven solutions in a specified context,  concept mapping to show the relationships between terms.

KM is more than a meta-business process (capturing best practices, conducting lessons learned, compling FAQs, doing AARs - after action reviews or gathering learning histories). KM is an approach to continual learning, linked to business intelligence, helps with competitive advantage, seeks to improve group and organization effectiveness and discover discontinuities in the environment. KM is about inquiry, reflection, review and distrusting complacency with the status quo.

Kaye Vivian approaches this subject through a recorded Q&A dialog. This is an interesting and informative way to surface key points.

When 'talking' of KM, it helps to have a clear understanding of the nature of knowledge, to keep questions - orientations in mind, explore the relationship between KM and decision making, pick your spot along the KM continuum and start KM with a map.

Collaborative tagging

What is the role, place and benefits of emergent bottom-up classification?

Tagging is taking hold, if we like it or not. Del.icio.us, Flick'r, Technorati and other applications are leading the way, showing how user-applied tags can be useful, social and self-maintaining. This interview covers open source tagging tools.

A recent review (which I discovered via the del.icio.us tag "knowledge") lists the benefits and the downsides of the genre.

I have found tagging to be a very useful way to seed & build a controlled vocabulary and keyword classification system for small virtual teams. It helps when users can find the labels that carry maximum meaning for them and are not forced into an imposed system of permitted keywords.

Folksonomies have their upsides and their downsides as stated in this post. It pays to be aware of the benefits and the pitfalls, watch for scalling issues, steer towards shared meaning and limit (redundant) synonyms.

Tagsonomy blog is a great place to keep abreast of current opinion in this area with writings by the leading thinkers.

So what are your thoughts on tagging?

Conversation & knowledge

In a world of information and knowledge, the key process for business is conversation.

Serving  customers, forming alliances and partnerships, dealing with suppliers, discovering new opportunities, informing markets - all are conversation flows. To leverage knowledge flows within any organization there needs to be a set of 'forums'.

A 'forum' can be virtual or f2f, formal, or impromptu, scheduled or emergent, contrived or casual. What is important is granting authority to attend and participate, allowing time for personal reflection and group caucus before starting , taking time to listen deeply and closing only after including time for post hoc reflection.

Deep dialog - where creative abrasion helps to move mindsets, contributors get into a 'flow state' and personal identity is set aside, plays a key role in promoting knowledge creation.

Conversations enable experience sharing via story, metaphor and analogy, - key steps for gaining understanding, learning, sense-making and becoming aware.

Conversations allow for social connection,  permit the emergence of new connections and meaning,  provide the medium for  promise and commitment, set the stage for future actions and encourage questions that spark deeper reflections and reviews.

In a little known book - 'The Praxis Equation: Design Priciples for Inteliigent Organization.' - Michael McMaster, 1997, p72, he suggests these waring signs when listening to a conversation:

Watch for permanence rather than process
Catch phases include, 'this is the way it is', language that suggests emergent, changing entities are fixed e.g. teams & relationships.

A fixed reality
Proclamations of a 'the real world' or an absolute truth, what statements of 'objective relatity' the speaker claims to know.

Unquestioned agreements
Cues are 'everyone knows', Bobby signals (tone) that discourage challenges, refutations based on social authority

Justification on historical grounds
Kill innovative thinking and negate the possibility that context has changed.

Unchallengeable statements
Based on speakers position, authority, expertise or force of argument.

Simplistic causality
Assumptions based on single cause, identifiable hierarchical sets, reducing complexity and emergence to linear elements.

Watch language
Buzz words, inability to clarify, define, explain or provide credible examples.

Knowledge requires conversations to emerge, knowledge needs dialog, social interaction, trust and reciprocity to happen - all knowledge is social.

Don't short-change your conversations!

Wikis, wellness and knowledge

There is a growing interest in wikis from business and professional groups. Wikipedia has certainly played a part in promoting this attention, but I wonder if things do not go deeper?.

The ability to build a source or core document, invite comments, accommodate multiple authors, anneal and refactor text, is a powerful form of knowledge related interaction. Building a corpus of information arranged by concepts is very different from blogging where posts scroll off the canvass, replaced by the next thought that comes along.

I'm involved in two projects using wikispaces, wherein the aim is to collect important links, document thoughts and rework existing script to make the experience clearer, deeper and more useful. KmWiki collects my views on knowledge management, serving as a switchyard to interesting KM places on the net and a 'permanent' record of topics that interest me.

Over the last week, I've been helping Dr. Steve Beller publish his very comprehensive white paper on the US Health System called Wellness Wiki. It will be interesting to monitor the interplay between these wikis and our respective  blogs which create a wide community space.

A discussion around a core document captures key elements, gives 'voice' to community concerns, and with time, morphs into alignment on the fundamental issues.  Core documents and source texts serve as 'living documents' to raise the level of  conversation and leverage the 'intelligence' of the group. They contain the:

• Fundamental  values
• Strategic statements
• Organizational design principles

that guide attention, energy and activities of the group, promote shared understanding and increase engagement.